TAHMO

About School and Satellites

We are pleased to announce an upcoming project called Schools and Satellites (SaS) to better quantify and understand precipitation patterns in Ghana in West Africa. Understanding precipitation patterns is critical for water management anywhere. In West Africa, rain gauges (ground-based measurements) are few and far between. Imagery from satellites (remote sensing measurements) can be used to estimate precipitation and present a potential solution; however, current precipitation estimates from satellites for the region are very inaccurate.

The goal of SaS is to use machine learning to improve these precipitation estimates from satellites; ground-based precipitation measurements from Smartphones4Water will be utilized in the training and verification of the machine-learning algorithm developed. Their classic 1.5-liter bottle rain gauges will be distributed to schools in Ghana, which will record local precipitation data using smartphones. You can learn more about this method of data collection here, and the accuracy of these gauges here.

For more information, please take a look at the pitch presentation that was made to win the grant.

The project will take place in Tamale and its surroundings and has kicked off this September. Already 6 great volunteers are taking measurements of the daily rainfall and are also testing together with us the equipment, phone use, and GPS.

All collected data will become open access and freely available with Smartphones4Water.

If you want to keep updated on the continuation of this project, please subscribe here to the monthly newsletter we will send out: sandra@pulsaqua.com